Page 71 of Immortal Longings
“Eno?” Calla calls. She slings herself onto the left pole of the ladder, opting to slide down its side rather than sparing the time to go rung by rung. Her hand is reaching into her coat, where she shoved the chains she stole, but the moment her feet land on solid ground, she feels a whistle of air. Calla slings the chain forward, narrowly blocking a knife hurtling for her head.
Two people, running toward her. Their sleeves are pushed to their elbows. No wristbands.
What?
By a narrow margin, she swerves to the left and avoids the blow of a sword from one of the attackers. A man with a stud in his lip. Calla straightens up. Is this the work of the Hollow Temple? Are they after her or Eno?
No time to consider it. Calla lunges for the knife that was thrown at her, stepping hard on the handle so the weapon whirls into the air and lands in her palm.
“Eno?” she shouts again. There’s no response. Whereishe? She whirls up fast and throws the blade, embedding it dead in the man’s eye. She doesn’t wait for him to hit the ground; before he has scarcely stumbled from the attack, she hauls her chain up and whips the second man hard, metal links colliding with the blunt new weapon he draws. The end wraps fast around the pseudoblade. A hard tug, and the weapon slips. Just as the second man ducks, scrambling forretrieval, Calla whips the chain again. It wraps around his neck. She pulls him in with one fast yank.
“Who are you?” Calla seethes. As soon as the man is close enough, she seizes her catch, squeezing his jaw hard. “Whoareyou?”
“No one, I’m no one!” the man answers fast, tears rising to his eyes as he struggles against her grip. “Please, let me go, let me go—”
“You’re not a player.” Calla hauls the man up, and his legs kick out, trying to find his bearings. There’s no use—the chain is still tangled around his neck. It only takes another tug to hold him tighter. “So why did you attack me? Are you Crescent Society?”
“No,” the man gasps. “No, we were recruited by an outside source. I have no grudge against you, I swear. Spare me my life.”
“Who?” Calla demands. Her nails dig in deeply, gouging five weeping wounds into his face. “Who sent you?”
“I don’t know!”
A slight twist, an attempt to move away. Calla releases his face, only so she can pull Chami’s dagger from her pocket.
“Please,” he tries to wheeze past the chain. His struggling legs leave tracks in the grass, overturning the yellowing plots with brown sludge instead. “Please, I was only taking on the paid tasks. They gave us instructions to hunt you down. That’s it, that’s it!”
“Useless,” Calla spits. “Damn useless—”
“They had black eyes! That’s all I saw!”
For a second, Calla stops. She feels her hands go cold, loosening on the chain just enough that the man tries to twist up.
Black eyes.
A flare of rage rushes through her chest, and before she knows what she’s doing, she’s slashed his throat, the blunt dagger catching on skin and crudelytearing through. The jagged rip opens his thickest arteries and veins, spurting blood with a vengeance. In seconds, the man is unmoving, surrounded by a puddle of crimson. His eyes turn dull.
Calla rocks back on her heels. Her breathing comes hard.
Every royal is bound to lose their mind sooner or later, drunk on the power in their hands. For Calla, especially, who remembers what it was like to be helpless, power has an unimaginably tantalizing pull. When she’s not careful, she feels the poison seeping into her thoughts. She entertains what it would be like to kill for the throne rather than for liberation. She imagines taking the divine crown for herself and never having to be weak again, imagines the whole kingdom—the wholeempire—kneeling before her.
“Eno?” Calla yells, snapping back into the present. “Eno, where are you?”
She gathers up the chain in her hands, shaking blood off the slick metal. The clearing near the city wall has turned eerily quiet. A twinge of panic twists her throat, then numbness—a terrible, aching numbness.
Calla doesn’t break into a run and scramble to search the vicinity. She doesn’t call out again. If there was no response the first time, then it isn’t a mystery. She can wish otherwise as much as she wants, but she understands San-Er well, better than she understands herself sometimes, and when she walks over to the alleyway, she isn’t surprised to find Eno’s body.
His eyes stare glassily at the sky. There’s a wound at his side, impaling right into his heart.
Calla crouches down.
“You little shit,” she mutters, and her voice breaks.
It was going to happen sooner or later. There can be only one victor.
But he could have pulled his chip. He could have chosen life instead… a miserable, dirty life, hungry and sick and cramped, persistently in fear of debt collectors.
Calla knows that most who take part in the games have no other options. The kid wasn’t stupid; no one would be throwing their name into the king’s lottery if it were that easy to walk away. Still, there was a part of her that had hoped otherwise, that there was some third path for Eno with a bag of coins and a comfortable nook in Er to settle in. San-Er offers the chance at a middling life, and for some, that is plenty. Out in the provinces, that wouldn’t even be an option. The provinces are split between two extremes: either utter destitution or palatial opulence reserved for councilmembers and former victors of the games.
